In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read Free Page A

since I’d been thrown out of CID and reduced from detective inspector to the rank of sergeant—an ordinary sergeant, that is, not a detective sergeant . As you can imagine, after you’ve been a detective it’s very difficult to go back to regular uniformed police work in a border police station. The official reason why the RUC had busted me was because I’d broken a lot of chicken-shit rules, but really it was because I had offended some high-ranking FBI agents over the DeLorean case and they’d wanted to see me brought down a peg or two.
    Police stations on the South Armagh border were future finishing schools for alcoholics and suicides with the added frisson of being shot or blown up on foot patrol, but what did me in was the night we had to take Sergeant Billy McGivvin home after he’d caused a drunken scene in a pub. Billy lived in my neck of the woods and I’d actually been to his house once for dinner, so I was put in charge of delivering him safely back . . .
    It was nine o’clock at night and we were driving up the Lower Island Road into Ballycarry village. There were three of us. Sergeant McGivvin and myself in the back, Jimmy McFaul driving up front. In theory it was a double-lane road but in fact it was merely a widened cattle track and Jimmy had us almost over into the sheugh because a car was coming the other way.
    To avoid dazzling the other driver Jimmy switched off the full-beam headlights as the car went past. I looked through the Land Rover’s bullet-proof windows but there was nothing to see: thick hedgerows on either side of the road and boggy pasture beyond that.
    The Land Rover made a clunking sound.
    “What was that?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Jimmy said.
    “It was something.”
    “You think someone shot at us?”
    I had heard bullets thudding off the armor plate of a police Land Rover dozens of times and none of them had made a sound like that.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Well, we got to get McGivvin home,” Jimmy said.
    The week before, Billy McGivvin’s wife had taken their three kids and flown the coop. A lawyer told McGivvin that she was in England and that she was divorcing him because of repeated drunkenness and domestic violence. McGivvin had decided to refute her claims by going to the Joymount Arms in Carrickfergus and getting blotto. He had begun swearing at the other patrons, calling the women “bitches” and “hoors,” and when they’d tried to make him leave Billy had pulled out his service revolver.
    McGivvin was a terrible police officer before his wife had left him and no doubt now he was going to be a lot worse. That didn’t concern me. What concerned me was the possibility that he was going to throw up over my uniform, which was only two days back from the dry cleaners.
    “It’s all right, mate, it’s all right,” I kept assuring him. “Soon be home.”
    “Blurgghhhh,” he replied, and drooled on the plate-steel Land Rover floor.
    We reached Ballycarry village without any trouble and found his farmhouse on Manse Street. Jimmy parked the Rover and dragged McGivvin out into the drizzle. We couldn’t find a key, even under a plant pot or the mat, so we had to break in through the back door.
    We stuck McGivvin in the recovery position on the downstairs sofa. We put a bucket next to him and loosened his shirt buttons. There was an enormous velvet painting of Jesus marching in an Orange parade that Jimmy felt might be in vomit spatter range so we took it off the wall and put it in the dining room.
    “I think that’ll do,” I said.
    There was a stepladder perched ominously under the light fitting in the kitchen. An ideal place for a noose. I collapsed the ladder and shoved it under the stairs. “How many Freudians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” I asked Jimmy to change the mood.
    “Dunno,” he said.
    “Two: One to change the lightbulb, the other to hold the penis—I mean ladder.”
    Jimmy didn’t get it.
    We walked back to the Land